Egypt's Armed Forces plan to distribute 140,000 boxes of food to citizens of North Sinai to mark the holy month of Ramadan, state news agency MENA reported Thursday. North Sinai governor Abdel-Fattah Harhour called on the social solidarity ministry to make priority for people evicted from their homes in Rafah to make way for the military buffer zone on the Gaza border. He said the estimated number of families in North Sinai is 96,000. Meanwhile, Ateyya Mohsen, social solidarity ministry head in North Sinai, said that 36,100 boxes had already arrived containing flour, rice, sugar, tea, oil, margarine, among other supplies. By December 2014, about 1,100 families had been evacuated and their homes demolished in the Rafah area as Egypt's army completed the buffer zone with the aim of fighting terrorism on the North Sinai-Gaza border. The evacuees have been promised swift compensation, but some residents have complained the evacuation notice was too short and the compensation not enough. The Egyptian army has been facing a decade-long jihadist militant insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, with militant attacks increasing over the past year since the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi. Sinai is an underprivileged area of Egypt, lacking infrastructural and economic development.
